Image Description: Alan Morison and Chutima ‘Oi’ Sidasathien outside the court in Phuket after their acquittal in September 2015
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand sends it deepest condolences to the family and friends of veteran journalist Alan Morison, who died this morning after a year-long battle against cancer.
Alan is best known in Thailand for the courageous stand he and his partner, Thai journalist Chutima ‘Oi’ Sidasathien, took against the Royal Thai Navy, after they were prosecuted for criminal defamation in late 2013 over a paragraph referring to the trafficking of Rohingyas in the news website Phuket Wan, which they both ran. Facing up to seven years in jail, they refused a deal which required them to apologise, and were eventually acquitted in September 2015.
Alan began his career as a cadet journalist at The Herald & Weekly Times in Melbourne in 1966, and later moved to The Age, rising to become a senior editor of a weekend section called Saturday Extra, publishing a number of award-winning stories. Michael Gawenda, who edited The Age from 1997 - 2004, described Alan as one of the best editors the newspaper had ever employed.
An early adopter of digital technology, Alan moved to Hong Kong in 2000 to be a part of CNN’s new digital news team. In 2002, he moved to Phuket, working with two local newspapers, Phuket Gazette and Phuket Post, and running a small publishing company. However, he found his reporting skills and experience back in demand again after the Indian Ocean Tsunami in December 2004, which killed thousands of people on Thailand’s Andaman coast. In 2008, he and Oi decided to start Phuket Wan, promising neither “to constantly praise the island’s virtues nor to cover the kind of crimes that happen everywhere around the world. We just aim to provide an accurate account in words and photographs of Phuket and its people.”
In early 2009, the couple stumbled on a significant scoop when they discovered that the Thai navy was intercepting boats carrying hundreds of Rohingya asylum seekers, detaining them on small islands, and then towing them out to sea and leaving them to drift. Their reporting attracted big international media to cover the Rohingya exodus, which hit the headlines again in 2015 when mass graves of trafficked boat people were discovered in southern Thailand.
Alan and Oi’s long legal fight against the criminal charges filed against them exhausted their resources, and they were forced to close Phuket Wan. They moved to Prachuap Khiri Khan, where they both enjoyed their shared passion for nature photography. Alan continued to support Oi’s campaigns for justice in poorer Thai communities until his health failed.
Under his mild, soft-spoken demeanour, Alan had a wicked, dry sense of humour and a steely commitment to the highest journalistic principles. “Really good journalism is about changing what is wrong with the world,” he said.
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